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Thank you.
So we're on to our next Mahasiddhi.
This should be in your reading one.
His name is Shabari or Shabari.
It's sort of a dhamka.
The V's and the V's in India, they are interchangeable.
So sometimes you're called Vishnu and sometimes you're called Vishnu.
And it's the same person, right?
So Shabari or Shabari.
a Shavara in the ancient times was someone who lived in the mountains,
and they were sort of associated with barbarians,
because they were hunters.
They killed other beings for their flesh.
And you can see this word in Shavasana.
Shava means a corpse, a cadaver.
And so a Shabara was someone who made cadavers for their living, right?
So Shabari was a hunter who lived in the forest.
And the ever-compassionate Avalokiteshvara, or Ishvara, if you're in another tradition,
was looking down on Chavarit, and he was so saddened by the fact that he could see this person
just continually cycling in this painful place.
You know, he needed to kill in order to survive, in order to get his food.
He needed to keep killing other creatures, and killing other creatures was just going to continue to harm him.
And he didn't see any way that poor Shabari was going to get out of this by himself.
So he manifested as a hunter, a fellow hunter, and he met Shabari in the forest one day.
And he's like, hi, I'm a hunter.
And Shabari's like, oh, where are you from?
Oh, far, very far away.
Very, very evasive reply.
And then he starts bragging.
This is Avalokiteshvara.
He's like, how many deer can you shoot with one arrow?
And Shabri's like, I'm really good.
How many deer can you shoot?
He's like, oh, about 300.
And Shabri's like, yeah, right.
Well, let's go hunting then, and we'll see.
So Avalokiteshvara takes Shabri out on a hunt the next morning.
And they're in the field with about 500 deer.
And Shabri's like, okay, now really, how many are you going to kill with that one arrow?
And Avalok Kittisvara's like, well, would you like me to kill all 500 for you?
And he's like, no, no, just start with 100.
And he thinks he's joking.
And he does.
You know, Avalok Kittisvara pulls his bow and arrow back,
and he shoots 100 deer with one arrow.
And Shabri's amazed, you know.
And then Adlo Kiteshvara was like, well, can you do me the favor of carrying one of the deer back
so that we can cut him, you know, to eat them?
And Shavri, he tries to pick up the deer and he can't lift it.
It's too heavy for him.
And somehow this whole experience just made his pride completely crack.
The poor guy was just like devastated that not only could he not shoot at all,
But he can't even lift the kill once it's shot.
I mean, his whole livelihood was just smashed to pieces by this one guy.
So he goes and begs Abelok Kiteshvara,
please, please teach me how to shoot the way you shoot.
And Abelok Kiteshvara is like, well, I don't know if I can do that.
And he's like, no, no, please, please, please, please, please teach me.
He's like, okay, well, here's my conditions.
You and your wife have to stop eating meat for a month.
And then I'll come and teach you, you know, and while you're at it, why don't you think about love and compassion towards all living beings, you know, for that month.
And then I'll come back and I'll teach you how I shoot arrows.
And so Shabri, he really, really wants to know how to shoot these arrows.
I mean, he's met a master.
He's met someone who totally surpasses him in his own trade in the only thing he's good at.
And now he realizes he's not even good at that.
So he's totally humble, and he's like, I'll do whatever you ask.
I'll even, you know, be a vegetarian.
Which is appropriate for last night, right?
So then Shabari and his wife are vegetarian for a month,
and Avalok Kichisvaro comes back.
And he's like, okay, I'll teach you how to shoot,
but first let me show you something.
And he draws this mandala on the floor with some rice.
And he says, just look into that square and tell me what you see.
And it was like this incredible, it was like Scrooge, you know?
Like the ghost of Christmas future.
He sees his, is his and his wife's future in hell.
Like burning in hell.
completely in so much pain that you can't even think, you know.
And he and his wife are terrified.
They're absolutely terrified by what they see.
And Avila Kutishvara is like, oh, well, what do you see?
And they can't even speak.
They're so frightened.
And finally they're like, it's us in hell, you know.
And how do we stop that?
How do we stop that?
And then Avalokiteshvara gets them to the point where they understand what future is in store for them
if they continue killing the way that they have killed.
And he tells them about the four kinds of karma that you collect when you do a certain action.
The first thing, if you kill another creature, it's what we typically think of as karma.
it will come back to you.
And that phrase, you know, the karma will come back to you
as a sickness in your body or as a shortness of your own life
because you shorten the lives of others, you know,
so that your life will be short.
But there are also other effects.
After you die, there's an effect.
It's called the projecting karma of where you go after you die.
And that's the hell that they saw in the mandala.
Then there's, and I think this is the worst one, it's the habitual karma.
You start to have a craving to kill.
The more you do something, the more you plant that seed in your mind to like doing it.
You know, so you're trapped by your own thoughts.
You're trapped by your own desires and your own mind, you know.
And then, what's the fourth one?
Let me see.
We did environmental.
Did we do environmental?
No.
You will live in a place that is dangerous to your life.
Like, you will get born as an animal who can't go to sleep at night completely.
They have to sleep with one eye open because there's always somebody who's about to kill them.
You know?
Like we saw when we were in three-year retreat and these animals in the desert, you know, the bunnies.
They're never quite at rest because there's so many creatures who like to eat them.
You know?
Like the coyotes and the snakes and, you know, and they're never at peace.
And you will get to that place where someone's always out to get you and you're never quite at peace.
So that's another karma.
So then he teaches him how he shoots arrows.
And he takes him up to this mountain cave, and he gives him a sadhana.
And he says, here's your bow.
This is the bow of compassion for other beings.
This is the bow of virtue and collecting good karma.
And then here's your arrow.
This is the arrow of ultimate reality.
And with it, you use the bow and arrow to kill the wild deer of your mind.
And you eat the, you partake of the flesh of non-duality.
And its flavor is pure pleasure, pure bliss.
And then he, you know, of course, spent 12 years, the magic 12 years in the cave.
And then he came down singing and dancing about karma and emptiness.
And that's the method that he used to teach all the people in the forest,
the rest of the shabaras of the forest,
how to give up killing and turn to a different kind of hunting in the mines.
I'm going to read you a selection
from Mahasiddha Shavari's works
which again were found by
John Brady's group
and we got them last week
it's called A Vision of Emptiness
it's a Tongni Hitawa in Tibetan
and it begins with
which means I bow down to loving eyes
which is the meaning of the name
Avalokita Ishvara
means the lord of power
who looks with the eyes of love
and His Holiness the Daya Lama
is considered the reincarnation
of Avalokita Ishvara
and it's interesting I think that
the hunter
is bowing down to the deity
who talked him out of hunting.
Then he says,
The ultimate thought is reality,
a seed we call the sky realm.
The youth embraces his lady of nothingness.
Let us wake up, let us stay here.
This is a reference to the meaning of yoga that we have,
where you raise the ana and you hold down the prana vayu.
And those of you who know the Vajyogini Satna,
it's a hamik shunu yongsu nye ki chene.
It means the youth of the moon.
So sometimes the vayu at the top of the body is called the moon,
or the youth, shunu.
And then that embraces Kundalini.
That white element, the moon element,
is brought down to the heart chakra.
Then the red element is brought up, Kundalini.
And then they embrace each other.
So it refers here to the Hatha Yoga.
It's referring to a physical practice
by which you raise one wind and lower the other wind
and create what's called a capsule.
This is the one meaning of Kumaka.
and then if you manage to do that
you will wake up
meaning you will see emptiness directly
then you should stay there
give it up, throw it away, blind to what you are
ah, shavari, playing in the ecstasy
of every single fetter
so he's saying
give it up, throw it away, blind to what you are
and it means, blind to what you are means
the tendency
to believe that things are coming
from themselves and not from you
okay, ignorance
avidya, right, so
then you can give it up
you can throw it away
if you manage to bring the winds into this capsule
and one special method
doing that is to practice with a partner,
with a spiritual partner.
So the highest forms of yoga in Tibet
are all practiced with a partner,
spiritual partner.
And you need training for that.
You need a whole series of teachings
before you get to that.
But what he says here,
playing in the ecstasy of every single fetter,
normally to have a relationship
with a partner is considered a fetter.
it's considered an obstacle.
And so yogis and monks traditionally have lived alone
and practiced alone.
They call it Thabatakyam.
When Yisoy Nisadaya Lama says,
I'm a simple monk,
he's thinking in his mind Thabatakyam.
It means a monk, a monk,
who lives...
A monk, a monk means a person who lives alone.
You know, that's what he's thinking when he says it.
And...
But when you...
And during your monk's career or your celibate career,
you build up this prana and you build up this ability to hold your prana.
And then you must, when you reach the highest forms of yoga,
you do that yoga with a partner, with a spiritual partner.
So he's saying is that a thing that would normally be a fetter,
now he's playing in it.
He's dancing in what would normally be a bondage.
So that's a higher form of yoga, which everybody must do eventually.
Everyone must reach this higher form of yoga.
We thought we would move right on to reading seven.
And if we have time after the break, we're going to go back to the verses that we missed in reading six.
But we are afraid that we're going to run out of time.
And this is so important.
These last few readings on chapter four that we wanted to move on today.
So reading seven, page one.
There is a certain person who, if you come to them constantly,
will take you to the state beyond all impurity.
I bow down to Shiva, the one who brings the end, the one who brings peace.
I bow down to my spiritual guide, to the one who embodies the sacred sound, the dot, the play.
So this is the first verse of chapter 4.
And it's sort of telling us what chapter 4 will contain.
You know, in the first verse, they always give you a clue,
or at least Master Shvatmarama always gives you a clue
about what his chapter is going to talk about.
And it's very interesting because in the very beginning of his book,
he bows down to his guru, Adinata, remember?
But then he goes back again in the beginning of the fourth chapter
and he bows down again to his guru
because what he's undertaking now is Raja Yoga
and it's so important that he feels like he must
throw himself at the feet of his master again
to even talk about this holy subject.
We're going to talk about emptiness in chapter 4
And emptiness is really slippery.
It's really hard to get a grasp on in your mind.
And the only way, we talked a lot about how our thoughts themselves come from the actions that we do around us to others.
Like we'll get violent thoughts if we do violent things to beings around us, etc.
Now we're talking about holy thoughts and how we get holy thoughts in our mind.
How we get to an understanding of emptiness.
How we can wrap our minds around this really difficult philosophical concept in a very meaningful and deep way.
And it's by doing good things.
It's by planting the seeds in your mind to see yourself have those thoughts.
And the most important seed in your mind that you can plant is bowing down to your teacher.
so he's actually telling us in this verse
the karma that we need to do
in order to understand the rest of chapter 4
so we bow down to
to Shiva
who is Ishvara right
like Avalokiteshvara
Shiva is synonymous with
our root guru.
Your root guru is always the
the lord of your heart, you know?
So he's going to take us, this
this holy being that's not of this planet, that's not of this earth, that's not stuck in the cycle the way that we're stuck in the cycle,
who's beyond it, and is going to reach out and grab our hands and bring us out of it too.
That is our gurus, right?
And he's going to take us to the state beyond all impurity.
What is impure? What is pure? We talked about it before.
This impurity is basically our state of ignorance and everything that spawns from it.
So thinking, for instance, like in a relationship, that someone is causing you pain or that someone is causing you pleasure.
Like looking into someone's eyes and thinking that it's coming from them.
Everybody has relationships in this room.
I'm hoping you'll relate to this example.
You know, every single moment of pleasure that you receive from like, I don't know, I saw Idle today earlier.
You know Idle, she's about this tall.
And she always brings a smile to my face, you know, it's like inevitable.
I see her, I start smiling.
Is that smile coming from seeing Idle, you know?
Like, is it just like this joy in my heart when I see this little girl that I love so much?
No, it's coming from something sweet and good and holy and pure that I did to other people in the past.
And I only think it's coming from it all.
You see, and so this whole world and everything around us is a lie.
Everything that appears to us is a lie.
We think that things are coming from this side, and they're not.
They're coming from this side.
And that's our ignorance.
And that's what spawns every single pain that we've ever had.
And that's impurity.
The ignorance and all the pain it brings.
And all the pain it continues to perpetuate.
That's our impurity.
So our holy guru is going to take us to a state beyond all of that.
Thank God.
It's the final end.
It's total peace, you know?
The one who brings the end.
the one who brings peace from all that hell in our minds
of trying to figure out how to get happiness from the outside
when it's not coming from the outside.
So then he says,
the one who embodies the sacred sound,
the dot, the play,
Nara Bindu Kalatmane.
So beautiful.
It's so beautiful.
so nada is the sound of the inner winds
flowing through pure channels
open channels in our body
and nada is the sound of the bija syllables
at our chakras as they start to open
and nada is also a symbol for emptiness
like the sound of the bell
you meditate on the sound
as it goes into empty space and thinking of emptiness.
Bindu, the drop or the dot,
is the drops of consciousness that run inside our channels.
It's like moments of consciousness.
It's like moments of time, these drops.
But they're a physical form.
How can a moment of consciousness be both mental and physical at the same time?
Something for you to think about.
So it's like a corresponding physical element that is our thoughts, right?
These drops of consciousness.
So, we take these drops of consciousness, we take these moments of thought, and we focus them on nada.
We focus them on the internal sound.
We focus on hearing the sound of our central channel as it opens.
We focus on seeing emptiness.
And that, joined together, is the play.
You know, the interaction between Nada and Bindu.
It's all, like, it's so beautiful because you can say subject and object,
but he does it in this, like, physical way.
Because we're working from the body, you know.
We're working from the physical form.
Even our consciousness, our little tiny drops in our channels.
So this is the play of Nada and Bindu is Kala.
Say Kala.
Then say Kala.
Okay, what's the difference?
What's the second one mean?
Time or what?
Or death, right?
And then the first one, it means play.
So that's what happens if you don't understand the difference
between a short A and a long A in Sanskrit, right?
So this is not the word for time and death.
It's the word for play.
Kala.
And the reason, it's like a single-pointed state of mind
turning into the inner sounds and winds
in order to perceive emptiness.
And the more deeply you get into this meditation,
the more blissful it gets.
So it's like, that's the reason that they call it play.
is because it's incredibly fun.
Really, it's really the most beautiful, amazing experience ever.
Better than anything you've ever experienced before.
Most of you, I'm guessing.
You know, this very, very deep concentration on your inner channels,
which is like producing these waves of bliss in your body
because you're thinking about all these holy thoughts like emptiness.
Every time you have a good thought about emptiness,
it's like you have a physical sensation in your body.
It's very interesting.
It's very fun.
It's kala.
It's a play.
So our guru, our holy spiritual guide,
is going to bring us to this state
where we can sit down in a perfect lotus or siddhasana
and meditate on these holy things and interact in this dance of bliss and emptiness.
There's just a verse in our Tibetan lineage that strikes me that's very similar to this verse.
I thought to read it to you.
In Tibetan, it's
Maybe some of you recognize it.
She does.
It is by your kindness that I can achieve the state of great bliss in a single instant.
Lama, with body like a jewel, you hold the diamond.
I bow at your lotus feet.
I bow.
I don't want to speak to you.
Do you need that faster?
No.
We'll go to the next verse.
Ate dhanim pravaksam samadhekamam uttaman
mardyugnam ca sukha payam
brahmanandakaram param
And so now I will describe to you the higher stages of deep meditation,
the way that we can slay death itself,
a path of pleasure, the highest method to reach the bliss of the pure one.
Again, this is one of my favorite subjects, which is that saying that you will slay death
here is not metaphorical, right?
And we should stop there and we should think about slaying death.
And I have this shtick, you know, people say,
you know, so Nagarjuna or Ayyana Nagarjuna,
people like that say lived for what,
seven to eight hundred years, right?
Or didn't die at all, right?
Rahman, Devi, Charantite, at the beginning.
They roamed the planet helping people
because they have overcome death.
And then people say to me, well,
I've heard all sorts of things.
Some people say it'd be boring to live forever.
Some people say they saw these movies where people lived for 800 years and they got all wrinkly.
No, and then it stopped and they crumbled into dust or something like that.
It's not like that.
You get younger and younger. You stop at about 16.
And your body is...
I tell my students sometimes, go buy a Vogue magazine and pick the body you want.
And I do it. We do it as a practice.
We buy a Vogue magazine. We go to Starbucks.
We order a mint tea.
And we just look through and say,
I would like to be that one, you know?
And whatever you think is most beautiful,
the general structure of the channels
and the shape of your body continues after enlightenment.
So you still have four limbs and a head.
You have your own, you get your own way about what they look like, you see.
But still you have this general form, okay?
And so it's not like, and it's not like boring, it's not like, I mean, when I was growing up
and I went to church and they said, if you're good, you'll go to heaven, and I'd say, okay,
but what's that like, you know?
And then your parents would say, well, you know, Jesus is there, and then you sit next
to him and...
now you're like for how long
and it seems kind of boring
and I don't know
my nama taught here once
in New York City
he came for one street
there's a street
below the park
it starts with a G
anyway
he taught there briefly
and one day somebody asked him
well what do Buddhas do after they get enlightened?
What's going to happen when we all get enlightened?
And he's like, maybe we'll just retire, you know?
And people were wondering what do you do?
But what you do is
you are appearing on all the planets in the universe
and you're quite busy.
And it's not growing at all.
And it's spontaneous.
It's called hundup.
Hundup is so famous that many monks are called hundup, right?
Hundup means it's spontaneous.
Due to your past good intentions during your asana practice,
thinking that you'd like to serve all beings,
then you reach a sort of threshold,
and then automatically you are doing it without conscious thoughts.
So no enlightened being thinks,
you know, it's eight o'clock, I've got to get down to earth.
to, you know, I don't think like that.
So it's really fun.
It's a play. It's a cosmic play.
The word here is mirtu gna.
Okay, mirtu means death.
It comes from mirt, to die.
Mortuary comes from that.
Immortal comes from that.
And then gna is another form of han,
which we already have,
which is to smite.
And the word gun comes from it.
So you're putting a gun to death.
which means you slay death
you no longer have to die
and you should take it seriously
and you should take your yoga practice
as a practice not to die
and if you can't do it for yourself
at least do it for your loved ones
you see
because I don't know
yogis don't have as much fear maybe
as normal people do
and they're very frightened
people are very frightened
and every once in a while
someone in the family dies
and puts the fear of God into people, you see?
So even if you don't have such fear of death,
it might be important to dedicate your asana practice
to reaching a place where you could at least help someone else overcome death.
Then he says a path of pleasure.
It's called Sukhopaya.
Say Sukhopaya.
It's Sukha and Upaya.
And in Tibetan, it's called De Lam.
Okay, De Lam.
And some people, I think, I heard some people might be exploring De Lam nowadays.
So De means, De Wa means, Sukha means pleasure, bliss, ecstasy.
And Lam means, Upaya means, Thak means method, or Pa.
And then there's a long commentary
why it's called Dei Lama.
And it's very beautiful.
On the one hand,
obviously this path of yoga
leads to ultimate ecstasy.
But then the path itself
is a lot of fun.
You see?
Because you have hope.
Most people have no hope.
Most people are just,
at a certain age,
they just give up.
And there's no real hope
for anything higher in life.
No hope to not die, no hope to save the world, no hope to live a life which was meaningful.
But once you start this practice, asana and hatha, leading to raja yoga, then you have hope.
And the karma of being nice to everybody is that you start to enjoy things more.
Like they say that as you reach enlightenment, then anything you ever eat tastes great to you.
There's a called rasa, eka rasa.
Everything tastes wonderful.
And it's really weird.
And just pleasant things start happening to you all day long.
Nice people, you're just surrounded by incredibly nice, sensitive, spiritual people.
You know, you can't get away from them.
Everywhere you go, you know, they're there.
And this is sukkah.
The path itself becomes pleasant.
And in the higher stages, the practice is done with ecstasy.
Emptiness is perceived through ecstasy.
So it's a very beautiful path and a very beautiful goal.
- Okay.
- Okay.
- Dina.
- Raja-yoga-samadhishthya
Vinmani ca Manonmani
Amarathvam Laya-tatvam
Shunya Shunya
Padam Padam
Geshe Michael and I are splitting this verse
so I only get to read that part
The following are all different names for the same thing
Royal Yoga, Deep Meditation
Going Beyond the Mind
Neither Within nor Beyond the Mind
Deathlessness, Withdrawing the World
Suchness, Empty but Not Empty
ultimate reality
so
these are all synonyms for Raja Yoga
if you want to know what we're talking about
in the fourth chapter
it's Raja Yoga, it's Royal Yoga
we talked about it in the very first class
Royal Yoga, the highest yoga
the yoga of kings
And so Raja Yoga is Samadhi.
It's a state of perfect meditation on emptiness.
It's going beyond the mind.
When you see emptiness directly,
you are beyond any kind of conceptual thought.
You are beyond your own mind,
because your own mind is a concept.
Yet, it says in the very next line,
neither within nor beyond the mind.
meaning when you're seeing emptiness directly
when you're in the deep perception of ultimate reality
you aren't in your own mind
and you're not anywhere else either
you are in emptiness
and you can't put a location to where you are at that moment
because you're not even you
it's just sheer emptiness
when they talk about samadhi
when they talk about
we're going to get to it later
but you dissolve into your object
so thoroughly that
the subject state of mind is not registered
you don't register a difference between the subject and object
does that mean that you become the object
No, it's just that there's no difference
There's no difference between subject and object
You can't distinguish at that point in your meditation
Between a subject and an object
You can't hear yourself thinking
Because your mind is locked so tightly onto one single thing
And it's not moving
If you were to be aware of a subject state of mind
That would mean your mind was toggling from one object to the next
It would be toggling from the object, emptiness, to the object, your own mind.
You know?
And it would be going back and forth.
In order to have a perception of your own mind, you have to take it as an object for a second.
You see?
So if your mind is locked onto one single object, you would never have the perception of yourself as a subject.
You would, for all intents and purposes, totally disappear.
And if you are on the highest object, which is what we're talking about in Raja Yoga,
if you're talking about emptiness, you're totally beyond the world itself.
Because emptiness is beyond all projections.
It's an ultimate state of reality.
It's unchanging.
I'm getting ahead of myself to the other words.
I have to go on to the next word.
Amaratvam means deathlessness.
So, in one sense, Raja Yoga is a state of mind, like Unmani or Samadhi.
In another sense, it's the goal that that state of mind brings us to.
So, it's a little bit different.
You get a sense of the different flavors of Raja Yoga.
We'll talk about Laya.
How many people have heard of Laya besides you, Sharon?
We know you know everything.
How many of you people who don't know everything have heard of Laya?
Okay.
So it's like, I don't know, like 25% of you maybe have heard of this word.
It's an interesting yoga term.
It's something that's called laya yoga sometimes.
And it's used, but it's not really explained very readily.
It's really a synonym for emptiness.
It's really a synonym for getting to emptiness by using the channels.
so that's laya
laya is withdrawing the world
in one sense you are taking
your two side channels the right and left
channels the channels
that hold our perceptions
of things as subjects and objects
right
and we're withdrawing them
we're making them shrivel up and go
all the energy go into the central
channel and that is how
we withdraw the world
you know we withdraw
the perception of subjects and objects by pulling all the winds that are running through
our channels that make us see subjects and objects, and we pull it all into the central
channel, and we see emptiness directly. There's another meaning for laya, withdrawing of the
world, which has to do with how our mind and body is formed. In the womb, the channels
form first, they say, and then the gross exterior body, the channels are like light, and then
the gross exterior body, which is flesh, kind of forms around it. Genshin Mike always says
like ice on a twig, and that's the reason why we're shaped this way, with this sort
starfish shape of ours, you know, with like these limbs and this head thing and these little bumps
here. And it's because it's forming around our channels. You know, the body forms around the
channels. But it doesn't stop there. The rest of the world outside you is just extra ice on your
twig. Right? The rest of the world outside you is just another layer of ice forming around
your channels. You made the sun. You made the moon. It's from your left and right channels,
right and left channels, actually. You are the ones. It's not that the sun channel was
named for the sun because it's hot like the sun. The sun channel was named for the sun
because it made the sun. And the moon channel is called the moon channel because it made
the moon. Our whole world, our entire world is just a projection coming from here, like
a little drop inside of our hearts and everything is, is coming out from it in layers upon layers.
And it's our, it's all our own, um, karmic ripenings. It's all our own layers of stuff,
layers of our body. If you would, would want to say it that way, you know, the whole world is
just another layer upon layer of our own body. And so when we withdraw the winds into the center
channel, we withdraw the entire world that we are projecting and we understand what we
are doing. Like we have an experience. It's a conscious experience that when you withdraw
the winds into the central channel, your whole world starts to dissolve and you realize, wow,
I was creating that and I'm dissolving it now. And the implications of that are astounding.
If I'm the one creating that, if I'm the one dissolving it now,
when the winds start to come out of the central channel,
when I come out of my direct perception of emptiness,
and I am interacting in the world again,
I know I am staring at something that I created.
I know I am staring at just an extension of my own channels.
And I know, because of that, exactly how to fix the world.
And that's the reason you can go into a deep retreat
and be helping the world much more than you would do if you flew to Iraq.
Because the entire world is coming from you,
and the most powerful, strong way to affect it is through your own mind
and through your own body and through your own practice.
I have a couple more words I have to do
but I really liked Laya
so I spent a lot of time on that one
Tatva means suchness
we had it before
and shunya means empty, right?
So, now you get, like, samadhi and unmani are states of mind, right?
They are going beyond the mind, or they're like the subject state of mind
when you're seeing emptiness directly.
And then Amaratva is deathlessness.
It's the goal you get to after you've seen emptiness directly.
But then Tattva and Shunya are the direct perception of emptiness itself.
It's the object that we're looking at.
So it's an unchanging thing.
It's a fact.
The fact that this room didn't come from anything but my own karma.
The fact that this ceiling and these walls are held up by nothing other than my own kindness to others.
That's emptiness.
The fact that it's no other way, the fact that it could never be any other way,
the fact that it's not the pillars,
the fact that it's not the pillars that are holding up this roof for me right now,
that's tattva, that's shunya.
It's an unchanging thing.
It's a fact.
It never alters.
I could leave the room,
it would still be a fact that it's,
you know, it's being held up
by nothing other than my kindness, right?
Or could it?
Maybe you could leave the room.
Think about it.
Think about it.
Okay, we'll do the other.
We'll do verse four.
These are more synonyms.
And this is really, to me,
one of the most beautiful verses of the book, right?
These two verses.
All different words for Raja Yoga.
And you know, in the debate ground,
in a monastery, you would have this class,
it would finish at 11 or 12 or whatever it did,
and then you'd all go to the debate ground
and debate it for three or four hours,
and they wouldn't let you go home
until they were satisfied that you knew everything perfectly.
And sometimes at dawn, they'd let you go home, right?
And so you get in the habit when you read a verse,
a shloka of Sanskrit,
that you start seeing where would the debates be here.
It's automatic for someone who's done it for a long time.
So, what he's doing here is he's sliding, as Christy has said,
he's sliding between the state of mind which perceives emptiness,
and then he's describing the object that that state of mind sees,
and then he's describing what happens to you if you do perceive it,
what's the final goal, like that.
Technically, he's mixing up.
There'd be a huge debate here in the monastery,
because they can't all be yoga, raja yoga.
Some are in unalterable states of being.
Some are constantly changing mental processes.
Some are the goal of that interaction,
which happens long after you see emptiness.
So you have to be careful to distinguish here.
You can't go around saying raja yoga is emptiness.
Right?
then you couldn't practice Raja Yoga.
You see?
Or you can't say Raja Yoga is only the goal of yoga,
meaning your enlightened body and mind,
because it's also the process.
So you have a beautiful debate here.
The next one,
the one I'm going to do is,
let me see.
Huh?
What do you think?
Eh.
Amanaskam is just,
what is it?
What did you try to say here?
Not thinking of things.
Not thinking of things as anything.
You're all sophisticated enough to know by now
that not thinking of things as anything
doesn't mean trying very hard not to think about anything.
No, and that was a popular view,
I don't know, when Buddhism first got to this country.
And now we've outgrown it.
We've gotten more information about what is really correct,
which is that you're not thinking about anything.
in that state of mind,
when you see emptiness directly,
you're not thinking about any other object
but that.
That's all. You cannot.
It's a higher reality.
And when your mind is in higher reality,
it cannot be on any
form of lower reality.
The passage of time is a lower reality.
The awareness of your thoughts is a lower reality.
So you can't even think to yourself,
oh, I did it. I finally saw emptiness.
You see? And you also,
when you come out of it, you know what time it is.
You don't know if you were there for a week
or if you were there for five minutes, you see?
So in that sense, you're not thinking
about anything.
Amanas kam tatat vayta
what they call transcending duality.
And again,
it's just what Christi Ha said. It's not that
we are trying to
transcend the
distinction between you and me. It can get
a little scary, right? If somebody
says, look, all the people in this room are being projected from how you act. You want
to know if you're a good person? Look around the room. It's very scary, you see? And not
just the room. Look around the world. Look in the White House. You see? Whatever you
see is an exact reflection of how you're acting. That's why you perceive that. You see what
I mean? So, then people can reach this, we call nihilism. There can be a nihilistic tendency.
They can think, oh, everything's me. So, it's kind of lonely now. Right? I mean, you could
go that way. You could say, oh, everything's just me. But it doesn't mean that. You're
projecting every other person in this room. They are a perfect reflection of how you're
acting, the good and the bad. But you are projecting them as separate people. Okay? You are projecting
them as separate people. Which proves what? They are separate people. Anything you're
projecting is real. Anything you're making up is real. So when you project someone outside
of yourself. They are a separate
person. And there were whole
schools of thought that grew up to explain
why
Carl's over there and I'm over here.
No, and there's a book
by Dharmakirti called
Gyshen Druche, the proof
of other mind streams.
Okay? Like that. So it's not,
you don't have to feel lonely. Okay?
But you do have to feel like
well,
I don't like to have someone in the White House
who's doing violence. And since it's a
reflection of me, I'll try to not yell at Christy tomorrow. Okay.
"Nir alamba" say "Nir alamba" "Nir" means "not" and "alamba" is a hard word but it
means hanging on something. "A" means "on" and "lamba" means "to hang" and then there are
Like, Ramka in Russian is a hanging frame and like that.
So, Alamba means to hang on something.
And then it came to mean the object of the subject state of mind.
I'm hanging on Michael Hewitt.
My visual consciousness is hanging on Michael Hewitt.
If he scooted down and I couldn't see him anymore, don't do it.
then that perception would no longer have anything to hang on,
and the visual perception would stop.
You see?
So in that sense, when you see something,
your eye consciousness is hanging on an object like that.
So then they say,
there is no support of my eye consciousness.
There is no support of any consciousness.
There is no object in the world.
And in Tibetan, what do they call it?
This is the mantra for Jansan Kappa, right?
It starts out,
Nira Lamba,
Nira Lamba,
Daya,
the love which sees nothing.
It's called the love which sees nothing.
Michael Hewitt scrimmed it down,
and I can't see anything now.
That's called the ultimate form of love.
if you ever get to Diamond Mountain
you can have like a one year course on it
okay, we just did a year
on it, right
three kinds of love, that's the big Metsawa
okay
and very very famous
and there's a yoga pose
right, Nirallambha, Sarvangasana
and other, where you're not
using your arms as a support
in a shoulder stand, so your arms
are up parallel to your legs, right
so it means non-supporting
I can't help it.
I want to do a little Neuralumba.
Where we live, is that okay?
Where we live, in Arizona,
there ain't nowhere to go.
And that was the idea.
You know, like, we have Wednesdays off.
No one's allowed to do any work on Wednesdays.
You're supposed to just goof on.
There's nowhere to go.
Sometimes we drive two hours to their house
to have Mexican dinner.
but there's one
gas station in Bui
and they have a little
ice cream thing
and they have
you know
that's like the biggest thing in town
they have sherbet
so we go there sometimes
and it's like the only person you ever meet in Bui
is the lady behind the gas station counter.
So she's famous.
Whenever we need an example for a person,
she's like the only one.
And then we were talking about
what does it mean to love her?
What does it mean to have compassion for her?
She's serving the ice cream.
How are you supposed to think about her?
If you're a Buddhist,
and you've been practicing for five weeks compassion,
and then you finally get a chance
with the lady behind the counter,
what are you supposed to do?
And there's three levels of love.
There's three levels of compassion.
Nir Alamba is the third one, is the highest one.
The first one is, they call just plain love.
And that means you're hoping she doesn't cut her hand.
You know, while she's using her tools and stuff.
It's the wish that other people should not have pain, is the definition.
Other people should be rescued.
Other people should be freed from pain.
Small pains and big pains of life and death.
But she shouldn't hurt herself
while she's scooping my ice cream.
That's one kind of love.
Number one.
Number two love is looking at her and saying,
in the five minutes that it takes her
to scoop my ice cream,
she will lose five minutes of her precious life.
She's getting paid like $3.93 an hour or something.
In Arizona, I don't know what it is.
It's probably two something.
And she's giving me an irreplaceable five minutes of her life.
Like, yeah, okay, she got paid 40 cents while you were in the room,
but she can never get the life back.
Love her for that.
Love her for the fact that in the time she scooped your ice cream,
she lost a certain number of minutes of her life that she'll never get back.
And it's priceless.
You can't pay anyone for their life.
so you love her in that sense
then the highest kind of love is
you look at her
and you think she's coming from me
you know
she's this girl working out in the middle of the desert
in this town
that's a dead end
and you know
no future
and she will live here and get old here
and die here anonymously
because I was violent to others
you see
see people around me get
old and die because
I wasn't kind enough to other
people. You see? She's
Nira Alamba. She's not
an object
in front of my mind. I'm
creating her. My behavior
towards others is creating her.
So then there's this higher form of
love for her. Like, it's
my problem. I made
her stand here in the middle of the desert behind
this ice cream counter to live in a
no good town to get old and die.
You see?
That's my fault.
So if I could
wean myself off of violence,
and a big violence is how you eat, right?
She would
gradually change into
an angel.
Who did it?
That's the highest form of love.
Because that form of love
knows how to save the world.
that's Nira Alamba
so now you'll never forget Nira Alamba
when you do this Sarvangasana
I like the next one
Jivan Mukti
say Jivan
Mukti
freedom even before you die
I love this
we teach at Christian churches
I'll give you a Christian church spiel in a couple of days.
One or two days.
Mercy, you'll have to get some kind of slideshow and get it.
But we teach in Christian churches now.
We're working up the synagogues.
And we teach them about this stuff.
And it was weird.
We were in Idaho.
And we were in this church.
And 500 people came.
And then we started talking about channels and deathlessness
and getting the prana.
and they were just,
they just bought it 100%.
They were better than the yogis and the Buddhists.
It was interesting.
They were all like, yes!
And the priest came up and knelt
in front of us at the end.
And we were like, wow!
We all knelt together.
And it was really something.
So Jesus, he says,
this is my favorite line of Jesus.
There are some among you here today
who will not taste of death
before you enter the kingdom of heaven.
There are some here among us today
who will not taste of death
before you enter the kingdom of heaven.
So this idea that you have to die and go to heaven,
or that you reach nirvana, you die,
and you go into some void,
it's all totally, totally wrong.
If I could be nice enough,
if I could be subtle enough with my nonviolence,
if I could really give up honey, for example,
then the lady at the ice cream counter
in Bowie, Arizona,
right?
She would slowly
change, and I would
slowly change. And when the day
I see her become immortal,
an angel, right?
Is she an angel or not right now?
That's emptiness. Got it?
That's emptiness. If I were
non-violent enough,
she would be an angel, right?
Since I'm not non-violent enough, she's this
lady working behind the camera.
so which is she really
that's emptiness
so on the day that
I see her as immortal
I have jivan mukti
I have jivan mukti
I have gone to freedom before death
I have entered the kingdom of heaven
before tasting of death
it's very beautiful
you don't have to die to go to paradise
it could be right here
but you do have to keep your yama in the yama
because there's no other way to do it
Okay?
Sahaja.
Sahaja is easy, and that's the last one I'll do.
And then we'll take a break.
Oh, there's a nice
Indo-European root for Jivan, okay?
It's Gwe.
G-W-E-I-H.
Okay? Gwe. So Jha comes from Gwe.
Jiv
in the Sanskrit is the root,
and it comes from an ancient,
an older root named Gwe.
And that comes into English as quick, meaning the quick and the dead.
And quicksilver comes from that.
And quiver.
And words that mean life.
One last thing, sa-ja.
Say sa-ja.
Sa-ja.
Sa means together.
Ja means to join together.
To come up.
To rise as one.
Two things rising as one.
In Tibetan it's very, very beautiful.
They call it shenke.
Say hlen.
Phan-ke.
Phan-ke.
It's a very, very, very beautiful idea.
As the winds enter the central channel,
as you do enough seated spinal twists,
that's the whole purpose of yoga, right?
We had one pose, we had 15 poses.
You had 13, there were 15 in the book.
As we did the 15 poses,
we're doing all, generically,
we've covered forward bend, back bend,
balancing, strength. They'll come
out in inverted pose later,
in the book. And you've done
all these different twists.
So you've brought the
purposes to bring
prana into the central
channel. Two things happen.
It feels really
good. When you have an orgasm,
tiny, tiny,
tiny amounts of prana are entering the
central channel. At the moment,
at the climax of the sexual act,
tiny, tiny,
amounts of prana enter the central channel.
In a normal person,
in an untrained person,
prana only enters the central channel
twice in their lifetime.
Once during orgasm,
and once when they die.
So there's an experience of
when this
prana enters the central channel
at death,
then all of the urine is released,
feces is released,
and the spirit is released.
it enters the central channel.
You have this jolt, and then you're gone.
You see?
And the sexual act is similar.
During the climax, small amounts of frana
enter the central channel, and you feel this jolt.
Then normally the chakra closes back up very tightly,
and you feel tired or bad,
or like within a day or two,
you lose energy, you lose frana.
We don't have control over the process.
But a yogi, or a yogini,
brings prana into the central channel consciously,
and it stays there all the time, all day.
All day orgasm.
You know, really, totally serious.
All day orgasm, serious.
And when the thoughts associated with that prana
enter the central channel,
you perceive emptiness directly.
So that's Heng Tukyawa.
That's Sahaja.
Bliss, ecstasy, physical ecstasy,
and the highest spiritual realization you could ever have
occur at the same moment in a yogi.
And that's the purpose of yoga.
Anyone who sees emptiness directly
will in a short time
become a person who can save every girl
behind every ice cream counter in the universe.
Seriously, total serious.
You can stand behind every ice cream counter in the universe
and serve every person, save their life.
That's the power of getting the,
that's the reason to do yoga.
We're going to take a break.
We're going to do our normal pitch.
So you've got to meditate.
You've got to do yoga.
You've got to be nice to people.
You have to memorize, study.
You have to serve your guru, serve your lama,
respect your teachers.
and then you have to serve people.
So yeah, you can stop the war in Iraq
sitting on your meditation seat.
But the lamas always say,
but for schmucks like us,
it's good to do some hands-on stuff once in a while.
Because you can get a little unreal
if you don't do some hands-on service.
Everyone here should do some kind of hands-on service.
even if you're a high yogi
you should still be going
helping in a soup kitchen or something
so every night we're going to give you
another project that we're doing
and if that strikes your fancy
then feel free to talk to the person
in charge of it
this is a project that started about
20 years ago
they go and find
ancient manuscripts
texts from the world that talk about
the stuff we're talking about
because there are not enough books about what we're talking about.
In English, right?
And they've located 104,000 manuscripts,
catalogued them for 20 years in St. Petersburg.
And then we use them.
Every night we use them.
All the teachings you're getting are because of the efforts of this project.
And it's a sexy project.
He was written up.
John Brady's going to talk about it.
He was written up in some, I don't know, like GQ magazine recently,
or something like that.
and they said,
they said,
Indiana Jones of the modern world.
And it really is that.
And we sat in this room,
I think a year ago,
and we pitched this project.
We said, look,
either give some money,
five bucks, ten bucks,
give some money,
or introduce John
to some rich friend of yours,
take him out to the money.
If he just gets him for ten minutes,
it'll be okay.
Or, go to John and say,
look, I don't have any rich friends
and I don't have any money.
Like Geshe Michael said,
we have to do something.
So, I'll Xerox old manuscripts for you
or I'll go with you wherever you go
or I'll help you out.
I have a body,
so I'll help you out with that.
So, think about it.
There's people all over the world
doing these beautiful stuff in their garages,
like photocopying and scanning ancient manuscripts.
Even in Arizona, in Bui,
in that dead town.
There's people in their garages now,
you know,
scanning ancient manuscripts for John.
And people sitting here a year ago
are traveling with him around the world,
like going to these exotic places
like Ulaanbaatar in Baikalia, Siberia,
and finding ancient books
and getting them
and ancient medical treatises
and stuff like that.
And we took a,
we asked for donations last year.
I think we got like $8,000 or $9,000
came by the end.
And that has paid
for an entry center in Varanasi.
So we, Christy and I,
spent two months there a year.
And it's very, very, very beautiful.
They're doing unbelievable work.
They have found
unbelievably rare yoga texts.
And they're just,
and there's this big house.
And everyone's sitting there typing them.
And they go out for free on the web.
so anyone can have them.
And the work is just beautiful.
And the feeling of the people,
because of John,
is just beautiful.
He's got all these Indians excited
about saving their culture.
For us, right?
So, it's just cool.
So I'm going to ask John
to do his own shtick.
Can you guys come up here?
John's a shtick.
I want to tell you a story.
About a year and a half ago,
I was traveling throughout India,
and I had arranged with Lady Ruth
to spend a couple of days in Mysore with her.
It was kind of a treat, you know,
to hang out with my yoga teacher.
I just was really looking forward to it.
It was something that was going to give me a break.
And I didn't, you know, project on it.
I didn't think about it.
I thought we'd just have a couple of nice meals.
And, you know, she'd show me Mysore.
And so, you know, I did my work in the Sarah Monastery.
And we were working with the input centers.
And then I arrived in Mysore, and Ruth and Lisa met me,
and we rushed off and had a meal,
and then we rushed off and had a Sanskrit class on the Patanjali Citrus
with this man, Professor Rao,
and then we rushed off to this remarkable Sanskrit language and grammar teacher,
Dr. Shah Jaya Sri, M.H. Jaya Sri.
and I was just mesmerized.
There was a moment where I realized
that she had the same vision as we talked
that Geshe-la and Christy had
about recreating the possibility
in their culture
of introducing the original Sanskrit
into their world through various ways,
through audio recitation and singing of the sutras and explaining it
and bringing it into the schools, into the grammar schools.
It's just one of their projects.
And so this started becoming a magical mystery tour.
We spent, I think, three or four hours with them.
And her brother, Narsimhan, was this other extraordinary scholar
who started telling his view of Tantra.
And, you know, the whole thing was just this celebratory,
you know, mind expansion, awareness thing for me.
And I got this connect that they and I had to work together.
That there was something here so deep and ripe.
It was ripe for us to say, we need to work with you.
It doesn't matter what form it takes,
but we need to connect here
because we have the same idea.
And then we, you know,
so that was the first day, you know,
pretty incredible day.
And, of course, the next day,
the surprise that afternoon, actually,
was meeting Shri Pataghi Joyce.
And, you know,
it was just another extraordinary moment.
It was like Christmas for me, in July.
And then the following morning, I actually got to see, you know, the level 3, 5.30 a.m. class.
And that was a treat.
So we ended up filming Jayashree and her brother that following day,
because I just wanted to get them, you know, into the immortal state of film and bring it to the world.
And so I decided to create a partnership with Jayashree and her brother Narasimhan.
And they're right now, they're in the process of choosing 15 or 18 very rare commentaries on Patanjali Sutra.
One of a kind, ranging from the 14th century to the 19th century.
And we have decided that we will scan these works or digitally photograph these works,
input them, and transliterate them into phonetic English.
And then they're going to translate them in a limited edition.
And then we're going to put them up on our website.
And this is just one of the projects we're working on.
So we're going to show you this in a second.
And I think I'd like to just call Ruth up here for a second
because Betty Ruth was instrumental on so many levels to make this happen.
She's got a few words to say.
Thank you.
Hi.
Hi.
Hi.
The first thing I want to say is that the first time that John went to meet Jayashree was before that visit.
And I knew that they should meet because I knew that you shared the same vision.
And so I gave John directions of how to get to Jayashree's house because I wasn't going to be there and I wanted to make sure that they met.
And I didn't know her last name, and I didn't know the name of the street she lived on,
and I didn't know her phone number, and I don't do email, so I didn't know how he could email her.
So I gave him this way where, like, you've got to go to the Jagan Mohan Palace.
And then from there, you know, walk down to where this guy's selling coconut.
And then from there, you know, make a right turn, and you'll get to this pink house.
You'll get to the pink house, make a left turn.
And then you'll get to this great big tree, and it's kind of like a shrine,
and it's all wrapped in string, and there are all these little pictures put into the tree.
And then right past that, you'll see this house,
and it'll have all these motorcycles parked in front of the house.
And you've got to go through the house and out the back door.
And down the alley, and then you'll find this little room.
And John was like, don't you have her email?
And I was like, I don't, but if you go to the John Mahan Palace.
And, you know, I tried to really persuade him that it would be worth his while.
And, you know, nobody else would have, I mean, I've tried to give directions like that to others.
And they don't end up making these kind of projects.
So John Brady is just an extraordinary...
You know, he's just...
If you want to do something good,
and you don't know what that is,
anything that John Brady touches,
I mean, what he has accomplished...
When I think about what I've tried to accomplish
in all the years that I've gone to Mysore,
and what I saw him do in three days,
It was just like absolutely baffling.
I mean, that's like I could talk all night, which I won't do.
But what he did in those three days blew our minds.
It was extraordinary.
So he's like, what he does in a day is extraordinary.
But anyway, I was supposed to say something about jayatry.
And it's hard to speak about somebody so great.
Am I holding this too close to my mouth?
No.
It's fine.
It's hard to speak about someone that's perfect
and to convey to you her perfection
without just saying that she's perfect.
And so I just wanted to relay a little story,
which was that there was this young man who was in Mysore studying yoga
with a great master named Katabi Joyce.
And there was this French woman that was there,
and he liked this French woman very much.
And he was hoping to spend time with this French woman.
And this French woman was studying yoga, and she was busy,
and she didn't have time to mingle with this nice young man from New York.
But he was persistent, but she was refusing.
So finally, after all of her refusing,
this nice young man decided that he would just kind of follow her,
just so he could be sort of in her world.
And so one day he followed her to the Jagan Mohan Palat,
and to the coconut man, and to the pink house,
and the tree with the string around it,
and the house, and the motorcycles,
and then into that little room.
And so this guy finds himself in this little tiny room
with all these students crammed together,
sitting on the hard, hard floor.
I mean, she has the hardest floor.
And they were singing sutras, yoga sutras,
And, you know, they were very serious and focused.
And so he got his seat, and then he was trying to get the attention of this French lady.
And then Johnny Shree, this beautiful, amazing teacher who's, it's all about God for her.
I mean, she's just like, she is not there, like what you were talking about.
I mean, God is there because she is not.
And so she realized, because being God, she realized everything.
She realized that something was a little off in the room.
And so she stopped us, and we were singing, singing, singing.
And in the middle of all that great momentum of singing beautiful Sanskrit sutras,
She says, stop, stop, stop.
And so we stopped, and she singled out this nice young man.
And she said to him, mom, she said, you knowing yoga sutras?
And he said, no, I don't know these yoga sutras.
And so she said, yes, she said, but you can sing the first one.
He said, no, you know, I don't know the first one.
So she said, oh, surely you can sing the first one.
And so she said, you sing it.
She said to him, and I mean, when she sings,
which you will hear.
So she wanted him to repeat it,
which he couldn't do.
He was like the French lady
was on his mind.
He didn't know what was happening.
He couldn't repeat this back.
He couldn't settle down.
And he couldn't...
So he repeated something back,
but it was like,
we were like, what?
Oh, that's good.
And then, but she, she persisted.
She persisted.
She said, no, no.
Shorty, shorty.
She kept saying, shorty.
Shorty, you can sing.
The first one.
Atayoga nushasana.
And then, you know, finally I think he realized that, you know, there was no escape for him.
He was going to have to.
So she said to him,
you relax.
And like everybody in the room,
we all helped him.
We all relaxed.
The way she said it, you relax.
And you could feel like,
maybe for the first time in a long time,
he was like giving guidance.
And he was like, all this testosterone.
And he was like relaxing, you know.
And then she said to him, close your eyes.
So we all closed our eyes.
He closed his eyes.
And then she said, you're going to love this.
And then she said, listen, listen.
And we were all like, you know, like helping him, you know.
Lisa was there.
And then she was like, Atta Yoga.
And she was like, you know, she kept repeating it.
It was more and more beautiful every time she sung it.
I mean, it was like in mating season.
and how birds like sing to each other
and each time is just more extraordinary.
I mean, or the peacock with the feathers.
I mean, it was really just astounding
how each time it was just more and more beautiful.
And finally, like, he repeated it.
He repeated it back perfectly.
And it was like, and we all felt,
we were all one with him and her and all of us
and India and, you know, some barking dogs.
and all this stuff that's going on.
I mean, it's not quiet in her little room.
It's like bustling indias all around this room,
and you hear everything.
And then the French woman...
Then the French woman took notice, you know,
but actually, the French woman left, like, the next day,
but he became a very devoted student of Sanskrit,
of Jayashris,
and the reason why I wanted to tell that story
is just that she is the perfect teacher.
She does reach.
I mean, here's this guy.
He's just there for the French lady.
And Josh was like, hmm.
And we got to witness it.
So it was like, it was beautiful.
But anyway, so she knows where all the books in India are.
And her brother, Narsimha, understands all these books.
And John Brady is able to fund projects that I can't even believe I'm even up here speaking about.
You know, these books that answer, Yans, Yans.
These books that the Yans.
For years, Guruji was crying talking about the Yans.
we were like what's he talking about
but he was talking about
the ants and how they're eating
all of these precious holy
books
and so that's
that's John Brady's project
and it's a pleasure for me to
speak about and sit up here
and I'm very happy
to talk about
Jair Shree and
all the projects
thank you
applause
applause
Thank you.
You want me to sing the three stanzas,
'Yogena Chittasya' and 'Deguruna'
The three? You want?
Definitely.
"I am
Ya Kunde Ndu Tushar Har Dhavala
And there we have got the left and the right. The Vama and this one.
This vama part is basically increases in terms of Tantra where you speak of the shakini, dakini etc.
There are so many things that which is a very powerful form, very quick way of getting evolution and enlightenment.
But it requires a powerful personality to do it.
So it is the opposite basically of this Raja Yoga part, where you go step by step slowly, even the weakest can climb at his own pace.
Whereas Tantra, that part of Tantra, particularly the Vamamarga Tantra is only for the strongest.
There what is happening is that whichever distracts your mind you use it as a means to test not to distract your mind.
You use them so powerfully that it becomes a catalyst for concentration rather than for distraction.
Life on earth, every person on earth would like to have many things, the desires are
many. And usually
the normal human being
likes to have good
form, that is beauty
and wife or
spouse, beautiful spouse
and beautiful house
and lot of wealth.
These are the
desires usually for
a human being.
And when such a thing is
acquired, when everything is
there, but
The mind is not totally merged into the lotus feet of the Guru.
Whatever you have, it's no use.
What then? What then? If it is not so,
if the mind is not with the Guru, then it's no use.
We're not talking about old books sitting in a library somewhere, getting dusty, right?
We're talking about a kind of knowledge and a wisdom in there that is totally different from what we have learned in the West.
And if you could use it, if you could learn to use it, you could change everything.
It would enrich our own culture.
Sri Lai Va Narayana,
Iti Samar Paya Mi,
Iti Samar Paya Mi,
Iti Samar Paya Mi.
Thank you.
of the year we finally did an analysis
of actually how much it costs
from start to finish.
From finding the text,
making a digital copy,
bringing it to India,
inputting it, checking it,
qualifying it, bringing it to New York,
and getting it ready for release.
And I think we came
out pretty accurate. It's 93
cents from
start to finish per page.
Per page.
And, you know, Geshe-la has
Eshola and Christi have been doing this for many years, and there are hundreds of thousands of pages that have been produced.
And now in the Sanskrit world, we are up and running beautifully in Varanasi,
and we're just putting our toes in the water in Mysore with Jayashree and our Simhan.
We are now settling into the idea that we will have an input center in Mysore,
and will directly work with also the Oriental Research Institute,
which was also welcomed through Jayashree and Narsimha.
Those texts are from the Oriental Research Institute in Mysore.
17,000 palm leaf texts.
8,000 have never been catalogued.
So it's a treasure trove of possibility for us.
So now, with this 93 cents a day,
We're going to work with the judge from Narcinan to first put in as many commentaries as possible on the Patanjali Sutras.
So we have this dollar a day idea.
And with the possibility of support, a dollar a day, $30 a month.
In a sense, you can relate to the idea that by giving a dollar a day,
you are saving one pesha, one manuscript, A and B, into a digital format,
which will essentially and inevitably be translated for the first time in many instances into our language.
So we have this kind of idea that this would be a way to support them for this four-year project.
So a dollar a day would be a remarkable opportunity for us to actually kick in this project.
And the Oriental Institute is just kind of waiting for us in the background to actually make this happen.
So one of the other ideas we had is we created a sticker, and it's called the dedication sticker.
And we're going to actually give this to everyone who wants to sign up to put on your credit card or your MetroCard.
So in the conscious nature of having to give your card out for whatever purchases you're using,
it's a way of reminding yourself of the possibility of giving a dollar to save one manuscript paycheck a day in your life.
So when you're pulling out your card or your MetroCard and you have that sticker on it,
you have this minute, this second,
to consciously dedicate that effort
that you're actually creating for you
to keep this form of teaching in your life,
to keep the actual Dharma
and the potential and the possibility of you
reading it in its original form in your life.
And as tantrikas and people on the way,
we know how to do this.
We know how we can shift ourselves into realizing that this can happen to us.
So that's my pitch tonight.
And there are people that are going to be in each corner of the room with cards that we have to fill out if you're interested.
And you don't have to give anything to get one of these.
Just fill out a card and we'll send one to you in the mail.
but all of you who have been helping me,
I am so grateful because the last,
I would say last nine months,
we've hired 27 people throughout the world.
We started a new project in Mongolia
where we increased the amount of catalog work
by 11 university students who are now working for ACIP
in this wonderful national library.
We also hired these incredible Tibetologists
who are trained at the University of St. Petersburg to qualify our text.
And these guys are, you know, they're in their 20s,
and they're kind of, they're moonlighting, they're outsourcing,
they have day jobs, and then they go to work for us,
and they qualify our Tibetan Pongyur tenure,
specific volumes that are getting ready to be released on our website.
And then in Varanasi, we just, we now have, I think,
11 or 12 people working for us full time.
So, and word is out.
People know we're on the block.
And exciting things are happening.
You know, texts are coming to us.
You know, people are coming over and saying,
well, do you know I have this private collection?
And we don't, you know, who knows what we'll find.
And so I want to thank all of you who continue to help us.
And also Rick Blue and Ritesh,
who have been remarkably helpful,
and Dahlia, who have been remarkably helpful
with continuing this project on stateside.
And Rick did the beautiful video tonight, so...
Thanks.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
and these books are very beautiful
because they're hand painted
so
collectors, art collectors
from Europe
from the west they go
and they have an aesthetic
interest
because these things
are so beautiful
and so in the black market you can buy
just like a page
so they're dismantling
these books
So it would be like we have the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.
So it would be like, you know, we'll just dismantle that.
And then, you know, then you could just buy a page for 20 bucks.
And then, you know, verse 1 will go with one guy.
And verse 2 will go with another guy.
And verse 3 will go.
And then the book will be lost, you know.
And so John Brady goes to Mongolia and he goes to the black market
and he buys as many books as he possibly can.
I mean, this is the type of person that we have here.
Have a nice book.
We'll see you after the break.
We don't have much time.
So we're on page 5 of reading 7, verse 5.
we'll do
verse 5, 6 and 7 together
just as salt when poured into water
becomes then inseparably mixed with it
so too does our mind unite
as one with its own true nature
We call this Samadhi.
Yadha-sankshyate prano,
mana-sam-cah-praliate,
pada-samara-sattvam-cah,
samadhir-abhidhyate.
When the inner winds are at rest and the mind is drawn in,
there then comes a state of balance.
This is also known as Samadhi.
Tatsamam cha tvayorakhyam jivatma paramatmano pranastasarva sankalpa samadhi sobat bidhiyate.
And this is also like the two of the individual in his or her world becoming one.
Every conceptual thought is abandoned, and it is called samadhi.
So, there are three main meanings of the word samadhi.
The first one is what we were talking about before,
about the mind being so incredibly focused on its object
that it forgets about itself.
That it's not toggling between awareness of seeing the object and the object.
That it's in a state of stillness.
Just the object.
just focused on the object, completely still,
without any kind of wavering.
That's a deep state of meditative concentration
that we call shamatha or stillness.
And in that state, it's like salt poured into water.
You can't tell the difference between the subject and the object
you're not perceiving both of them.
You're so immersed in your object
that you're just melted.
It's like you're melted into the object.
Do you become the object?
No.
But you just can no longer for that period of time
perceive yourself as a subject
because that would be another object.
The second meaning of samadhi
is a direct perception of emptiness.
It talks about, in the first of these verses,
how the mind unites with its own true nature.
This true nature, which is Atman,
which is so disputed in the yoga text,
like what does Atman mean, the self, right?
Because we are trying to get to the bottom of this self thing.
You know, we are trying to figure out what is not ourselves a lot of the time.
You know, this body and this mind is not myself, is not the ultimate self nature.
This body and this mind is just another projection.
It has the same reality as the rest of the world around me,
that I am projecting.
But I can't say I am projecting anymore
when we're talking about the emptiness of the self.
It is a projection.
The self is a projection,
just as much as the walls of this room,
just as much as all the people in this room.
Also, the self is being projected.
Your sense of me is a projection, right?
the fact that you are nothing other than that projection is your own emptiness.
The fact that me is nothing other than a projection in my mind,
a series of moments of projections in my mind going off, forcing me to see me,
that's my emptiness.
Right?
And that fact is what they call my true nature or my Buddha nature.
It never changes.
It's totally constant.
You know, it's the emptiness of me.
It's the fact that I am nothing more than my momentary projections.
And what does that mean?
That means that I have the capacity to become anything.
because I am not fixed
because the me that I'm perceiving now is not fixed
I could have the karma to see my own thoughts
as thoughts of a perfectly enlightened being
and that's the important part
you know
the reason that emptiness of ourselves is so important
the reason we need to understand more
about the emptiness of ourselves than anything
is because this is our goal
you know this is what gets us to the ultimate goal
understanding that you could see your body change
from something of flesh and blood into something of light
because you don't have a body.
Right?
Your body can change from something of flesh and blood
into something of light because you don't have a body.
You don't have a body the way you think you have a body.
You have a body that's being projected.
It's a body that's like a momentary projections, flashes in the mind.
It's like a bunch of flashes going so fast, it creates the illusion of movement.
And you think I moved my hand across the room.
It's projections coming from my mind, right?
It allows me to change my body into light.
It allows me to change my thoughts from thoughts of,
God, that person is so annoying,
to thoughts of everybody is so amazingly blissful.
I mean, it allows you to change your mind into a being
who is never going to have another negative thought again,
into a being that only perceives of others as an opportunity to give.
Instead of seeing what you can get from others, you know?
Like we're always, we're in this mindset all the time.
If you're a human, I'm not quite sure, but if you're a human,
you're in this mindset all the time of what can I get from them?
You know, when you interact with any other person.
How do they think of me?
How can I make them think well of me so I can feel good about myself?
You know, it completely turns around.
You know, you have different thoughts in your mind.
You have the capacity for completely different thoughts in your mind
because you are empty,
because you have this Atman,
because you have this true nature,
because you have this nature that can become a Buddha,
this nature that can become a holy being,
a holy Maha City that all they want to do
is wander around the world and change forms
so that they can be a hunter,
so that they can help other hunters get away from their bad karma.
You know, I mean, your only motivation would be to help people.
Because you would understand that helping people brings you,
like, it brings everybody complete happiness, you know.
So that's, that's Adman and that's Samadhi.
There's a third definition of Samadhi.
which is Buddhahood itself.
And you can see this also in the same lines.
When your mind unites with its true nature
in the sense that in the final stages
of when you reach the ultimate goal,
you will be a being that can see ultimate reality
and then can see every single other thing
in the entire universe at the same time.
Nobody but enlightened being
can simultaneously have a deep perception,
direct perception of ultimate reality
while seeing deceptive reality at the same time.
I did these three.
You just do.
And then we're finished.
Oh.
We're almost caught up if I do two verses.
So they're caught up.
Okay.
We're on verse 8 of chapter 5.
Raja Yoga Sya Mahatmyam
Kovha Janati Tattvatah
Znyanam Muktih
I better do it again.
You don't have to.
Lung means oral transmission.
You have to hear it one time too, right?
Raja Yoga Sya Mahatmyam
Kovha Janati Tattvatah
Znyanam Muktih
Siddhir
Guru Vakena Labhyate
For the one who fully grasps
the culmination of oral yoga,
Wisdom, freedom, stillness, and attainments are all within reach
by relying on the advices of their spiritual guide.
That's the punchline.
He's like, oh, you can get royal yoga.
You can get perception of emptiness.
You can get free of your mental afflictions.
You can get meditative stillness.
You can get high yogic attainments.
But I can't say it better than Jaya Shri Deva.
It's so, so beautiful.
How can you reach anything
if you don't plant your head at the feet of your,
the lotus feet of your mama?
I get to do it.
And it's such, I don't know,
it's just a comfort.
It's just a, what do you call it?
It's a refuge.
It's a shelter.
If you have a guru,
you don't have any problems in your whole life.
And I had the honor, I had the good luck to have one my whole life, right?
And to live with them my whole life.
So, find them. That's all. Just find them.
And again, in yoga, in tantra, it might not be somebody from India who wears robes.
You know, it might not be who's on the stage.
It might be the person sitting next to you.
Or it might be your child.
Or it might be your parents.
Or something like that.
So don't be limited when you're looking for them.
They're very sneaky beings.
And they appear anywhere in your world where it would be of most benefit to you.
But find your guru.
find your root guru
you must find them
and then you throw yourself at their feet
and you just do what they say
and we're modern people
and we're stubborn
and we think we know better than everybody
and it's a very
when you really try to submit to your teacher
you find out
you don't really want to submit to your teacher
and
I've been through it my whole life
and to the degree that we can
surrender to our teacher. All our problems are taken care of. Just, there's no worries
in the world. Just everything is perfect.
Yeah.
Darlab
state. So, they come to us from many worlds away. They come to us from a totally different
world, as far away from one star, the distance from our star to another star. They come to
us. And
even as when we are very
young, they already
have chosen us.
The Guru has chosen us already.
And then they just start
guiding your life
to them.
You know, in many forms.
So, your mom,
your brothers and sisters,
all of
them
are in one sense.
They are your Guru.
guiding you, your school teachers,
your first, second, third grade school teachers,
they were consciously guiding you
to your teacher.
So don't think less than that.
Don't believe anything less than that.
Your whole life,
there have been people masquerading.
It's like the Truman Show thing.
Just like the Truman Show thing.
We saw that, then we walked out.
I almost died right there.
Something accidentally happened.
It was really weird.
I think Rob was there
it was really weird
somebody threw something off a rooftop
it hit me on the top of the head
and it was like
that was okay
to die right then
because I saw the Truman Show
you know
and then
it wasn't weird
it was like okay
I didn't know I was going to die
and then I was thinking
you know
that movie was right
everyone's been working on us
all our lives
and your guru is guiding you
that's all, just feel happy and safe with it
Amen.
If they go I give Rokunanda
Shingla Juru Varsho
Dham Guru Radha Nathala Kanyatayami
Ge Vadi Ge Vokan
Sanam Yeshe, Son Sok Sheen.
Sanam Yeshe, Lejume.
Dabaguri Dabasho
Thank you.